The TripAdvisor hotels with a five-star critic in every room

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The wisdom of crowds? Well, maybe not. TripAdvisor became the world’s largest travel website thanks to its vast body of user reviews – the promise that whatever hotel you picked, you could find out from your fellow travellers whether the views were quite as delightful as in the brochure, the bedsheets as crisply starched. Now, after a four-month investigation, the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that since what it politely refers to as “non-genuine content” could appear on the site undetected, the slogan “Reviews you can trust” was rather inappropriate.

To be honest, the only surprise is that it took the ASA four months, rather than five minutes. TripAdvisor might be right to insist that it has stringent anti-fakery systems, and that fraud is at an “extremely low level”. But given the life-or-death importance of the site – especially to small operators such as B&Bs – it’s no wonder people are obsessed with gaming the system. Indeed, Adam Raphael, the editor of The Good Hotel Guide, has claimed that as many as half of the reviews could be “collusive” (not to mention being “loaded with whingers, oddballs and Americans”).

The examples of foul play are legion. One hotel has confessed to writing “probably 80 per cent” of its own reviews. Others apparently bribe guests to give positive feedback in exchange for discounts and upgrades, pay people to leave fake panegyrics, or even libel their rivals with claims of food poisoning, bedbug infestations or credit card fraud. The customers are no better: stories abound of amateur blackmailers threatening to pan a hotel unless they get a discount on the bill.

The promise of sites such as TripAdvisor is that, via sheer volume of content, they provide a more accurate picture of a hotel, or a film, or a play, than any single expert. A newspaper’s food critic might be deeply knowledgeable and wonderfully entertaining, but there’s always a chance that he turned up on the day the chef broke his collarbone, the waiters went on strike and the cat got at the bouillabaisse. A hundred reviews from a hundred perspectives might offer a better feel.

That could well be true, as far as it goes. But there are a few small problems. First, such sites have helped to foster a culture in which everyone’s a critic: customers expect five-star service at two-star prices, and howl online if it isn’t forthcoming. Second, pseudonymity is a powerful sponsor of drive-by malice or cynical self-promotion: witness the humiliation of historian Orlando Figes, who rubbished his rivals on Amazon, or even Boswell, who labelled his own work “a book of true genius” (Sir Walter Scott was rather more sporting, anonymously damning the “loose and incoherent style” of his own narration).

Another difficulty is that it’s not just individuals, but companies, who get involved. In 2006, some amateur rap videos praising Sony’s PSP games console – as well as a pester-power website called “All I Want for Xmas is a PSP” – turned out to be produced by Sony’s own marketers. More recently, a new Jurassic Park game received some glowing online notices even before it was published. As one exposé noted dryly: “Between the reviewers’ constant lionising of [the game’s creators], complete sentences, proper punctuation, and paucity of spelling errors, we began to suspect that the user reviews were not the product of actual players.”

As the internet develops, increasingly sophisticated techniques are being used to combine expert opinion and mass wisdom. At one end of the scale is the simplicity of Facebook’s “Likes”; at the other is a site such as Metacritic, which collates the verdicts of professional critics and bundles them together to produce a “metascore” out of 100. While an individual writer may quibble that his nuanced, 2,000-word review has been arbitrarily assigned an 85/100, the aggregate does give a good sense of where critical opinion lies. So influential has Metacritic become within the games industry that pay and share prices are often determined by its scores.

There is still one big criticism remaining, however. Such a system might well work for mainstream products – but what about Marmite goods, things people either love or hate? Or ideas that are so radical that no one knows quite what to make of them?

If you’d polled the audience at the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, it would have been declared a thundering stinker – as would Rachmaninov’s First Symphony, whose premiere was given by a conductor widely suspected of being steaming drunk. The Office, the defining British sitcom of the past few years, launched to near-disastrous ratings.

However useful the five-star system is, we still need to leave a space for complexity, to accept that one man’s meat can be another’s poison. And, of course, to bear in mind that when Phil from Leeds bills your grotty local pub as “Fantastic – first-rate!”, he may not be quite the disinterested judge he appears.